WHAT MADGE FOUND IN THE ATTIC
"Aunt Sue," declared Madge gravely, wrinkling her straight, dark
eyebrows into a solemn frown, "there is only one thing that worries me
about our second houseboat party: Nellie and I haven't enough pretty
clothes."
Mrs. Butler looked as though she quite agreed with her niece. It was
the day after Mrs. Curtis's hurried call.
"You see, it is this way, Auntie. On our first trip our houseboat was
anchored in a quiet, out-of-the-way place. We met Mrs. Curtis only by
accident and had a few parties at the Belleview Hotel. This time we are
to be Mrs. Curtis's guests. Although the houseboat won't be on the
Virginia side of the bay, because the water is much too rough there, we
shall probably be crossing over to Fortress Monroe and Old Point and
all the lovely places near. Mrs. Curtis will be sure to get up parties
for us. We may even look on at some of the dances at Fortress Monroe.
So Nellie and I ought each to have a new evening gown, besides our
white silk gowns. Don't you think so?"
Aunt Sue sighed in answer to Madge's question.
"I don't see where new party gowns are to come from, dear. Even if I
felt we could afford them, I simply haven't time to go to town to get
the material for them. It has taken a great deal to get you and Nellie
ready for school, since you will go directly to Miss Tolliver's when
your houseboat party is over. Fortunately, your new school clothes will
be suitable for most occasions, as the weather will probably be cool.
Somehow I feel uneasy about this second houseboat party. I have a
premonition that something will happen to you girls. Your uncle thinks
I am absurd. He says you are very fortunate to have made a friend like
Mrs. Curtis, and to have another opportunity to enjoy your houseboat. I
suppose I am foolish." Mrs. Butler smiled nervously. "You know I am
rather given to having premonitions, so don't concern yourself about
anything I have said to you."
Mrs. Butler was a delicate, high-bred looking woman, with soft blue
eyes and brown hair lightly streaked with gray, who was quite likely to
be influenced by her wilful niece's opinions. It was in her Uncle
William that Madge met her match.
"Nellie!" called Madge when her aunt had finished speaking, "please
come in here. I want to persuade Auntie to do something that I am going
to ask of her, and I wish you to help me."
Nellie appeared at the dining room door, her fingers stained with
grape-juice. She was determined to help her mother with the jelly
before she and her cousin left for their second houseboat holiday.
"You don't need any one's help when it comes to having your own way,"
retorted Mrs. Butler. "What do you wish this time?"
Madge lowered her voice. "Auntie, you know that upstairs in Mother's
old trunk there are two rolls of silk--a roll of rose-color and one of
turquoise blue. You have always said that Father brought them home to
Mother from China just after I was born, and that Mother never had them
made into dresses, because she died soon afterward, when Father failed
to return from his trip."
Mrs. Butler bowed her head quietly. She looked away from her niece.
"Yes, that is what I have told you. I am saving the silks until you are
older. You have very little else of your mother's except her jewelry."
Madge clasped her hands together pleadingly. "O Aunt Sue! why must I
wait until I am grown for those silks? I wish you to give them to
Nellie and me now. Please, please do. I am sure we are old enough to
appreciate them. Nellie would be a perfect dream in the pink silk, and
I should dearly love to have the blue. We never, never can need the
dresses more than we do _now_! Why, in two or three years Nellie and I
may be rich! Who knows? What is the use in keeping them for some future
time, when Nellie and I need them at the present moment? You know we
ought to have one handsome gown apiece, Auntie. Mrs. Curtis and
Madeleine are always beautifully dressed."
"Yes, Mother, please let Madge have her way," entreated Nellie. "But I
can't accept one of the frocks. I wouldn't take it away from you for
the world."
"Very well, Auntie," replied Madge, with a little choke in her voice.
"I am sorry I mentioned the subject to you. I don't care for the silks,
then. I won't even look at them, unless Nellie will take one of them."
"Silly Madge!" remonstrated Eleanor, coming up behind her cousin and
tweaking a loose curl of her auburn hair. "I know you wish me to share
everything with you, and I thank you just the same. But, Madge, I can't
accept one of those dresses. Don't you see, they were your mother's,
and that makes all the difference in the world."
"I can't see what difference it makes if I wish to do it. You always
divide everything you have with me, and I don't see why you can't let
me be generous for once."
Madge's eyes were misty. The thought of her mother and father made it
hard for her to speak without emotion. "Besides," she added, smiling in
her charming fashion, "I will never wear a pink gown. No one need try
to persuade me. It wouldn't be in keeping with my red hair!"
Eleanor put her arm around her cousin. She understood the little quaver
in Madge's laughing voice.
"Of course I will have the dress, if you feel that way about it," she
said gently. "And I shall adore it. Why, I can see myself in it this
minute, with a pink rose fastened in my hair. But all this time you and
I have been arguing Mother has not yet said that you could use the
silks. Please consent, Mother; there's a dear."
Mrs. Butler looked grave. "I suppose it is all right," she hesitated.
"The silks belong to Madge and she is old enough to decide what she
wishes to do with them. Look in my left-hand bureau drawer, Madge; you
will find the key to your mother's trunk there. The silks are in the
bottom of the trunk, wrapped in a piece of old, yellow muslin. We might
as well find out whether the material is still good before we decide
what we will do about it. I must go back now to my jelly; it must be
nearly done."
"Come up to the attic with me, won't you, Eleanor?" invited Madge.
Eleanor shook her head. She knew her cousin liked best to make these
visits to her mother's trunk alone. "No," she answered, "I must help
Mother with the jelly."
Nellie slipped quietly away and left Madge looking dreamily out on the
elm-shaded lawn, her thoughts busy with the story of her own past and
the little she knew of her father.
He had been a captain in the United States Navy, and one of the
youngest officers in the service. The Mortons were an old Virginia
family, and after Robert Morton's graduation from Annapolis he was
rapidly promoted in the service. He had married Mrs. Butler's only
sister, Eleanor, for whom Nellie was named. Two months after Madge's
birth, while her husband was away on a cruise, Madge's mother died at
her sister's home, and, as her father never came back to claim her, she
had been brought up by her uncle and aunt. This was all she had been
told of the story of her mother and father. It made her aunt unhappy to
talk of them, so Madge had asked few questions as she grew to young
womanhood. But to-day she felt that she would like to know whether her
father had died and been buried at sea--she always thought of him as
dead--or whether a tablet had ever been erected to his memory at
Annapolis. She had never been to Annapolis, although it was not a great
distance from Miss Tolliver's school, but she knew that the Government
often honored its brave officers and sailors with these memorials.
She was thinking of these things as she left the dining room and
climbed the steep, ladder-like stairs that led to the attic. The attic
of "Forest House" was worth a longer journey than Madge had to make. It
was built of solid cedar wood, with beams a foot thick over head, and
put together with great cedar pegs. The attic was a long, low-ceilinged
room, dark and fragrant with the odor of the cedar. It was lit by four
big, old-fashioned dormer windows in the front and four in the rear.
Her mother's trunk was kept in one corner of the attic behind an old
oak chest. Mrs. Butler did not wish to be haunted by sad memories when
she made her frequent trips to her attic to look after the family
clothing and bedding, so she had partly hidden her sister's trunk.
Madge opened the trunk in the half light. On top of everything was a
pile of her first baby dresses. Farther down she came upon a sandalwood
box containing her mother's jewelry. The box contained a beautiful and
unusual collection of rare stones. Captain Morton had brought many of
the jewels back from the Orient as presents to his wife.
Madge picked up a necklace of uncut turquoises, set in links of
curiously carved dull gold. For an instant she looked at it, then
slipped it over her head. There was also a tortoise-shell comb of
wonderful beauty to match the necklace. The crown of the comb was
formed of turquoises and pearls. Just in the center of the comb was a
tiny scarab made of turquoises. The scarab Madge knew to be a beetle
sacred to the Egyptians. She wondered if the beautiful set of jewelry
had an unusual history. Madge put the comb in her hair, then plunged
deeper into the lavender-scented trunk. Under a pile of old-fashioned
gowns she found the bundle that she desired, tied up in yellow muslin
just as her aunt had described it. Tucking it under her arm she hurried
to the front windows and sat down Turk fashion on the floor. She wished
to examine carefully the well-remembered silks. It had been several
years since she had seen them, yet how well she recalled them! She and
Nellie had never grown tired of marveling at the beautiful fabrics
when, as little girls, they were allowed to glance at the silks by way
of a special treat.
The young girl untied her precious bundle slowly. She gently unrolled
the pink silk. It was a wonderful rose color, a pure Chinese silk, as
light and soft as a butterfly's wing. Madge saw a vision of Nellie in
this dress. It must be trimmed with an old collar of Venetian point
lace, which was one of Mrs. Butler's heirlooms. Then she unrolled the
blue silk. The material to be used for her frock was a Japanese crepe.
It had a border of shaded blue and silver threads forming a design of
orchids. It was too beautiful a costume for a young girl, Madge
thought. She held her breath as she looked at it. Would her aunt allow
her to use it?
Spying a broken mirror on an old bureau in the attic, she brought it
over to the light and propped it against the back of a worn-out chair.
Then she wrapped the blue silk about her shoulders and stared at
herself in the mirror.
Madge was an exceedingly pretty young girl. This afternoon her face
showed a promise of the unusual beauty that was to come to her later in
life, when she had learned many things. There was a hint of tragedy in
her charming, wayward nature. The friends who loved her knew that her
path through life would not follow an easy and untroubled road. She
could never do anything in a half-way fashion, whether it were to love
or to hate, to be happy or to be miserable.
To-day her blue eyes were dark with wonder at her own appearance and
with the memory of her dead mother and father. With the strange jewels
in her hair and about her throat, the beautiful blue robe around her
shoulders, little country-bred Madge looked as though she might have
been a beautiful princess of the long ago.
Being free from vanity, however, she calmly folded up her silks, took
off her jewels, and turned from the window to go downstairs to show her
cousin her treasures.
At the door of the attic she paused and glanced back at the open trunk,
then, walking slowly toward it, deposited her jewel box and armful of
silks on the top of the old cedar chest and sat down before the trunk.
What strange influence drew her back to it that day Madge could never
explain. She knew only that the longing for the love of the father she
had never seen, and the mother she could not remember, was strong
within her.
"What made you leave me when I needed you so?" she murmured, half under
her breath. Then she bowed her head on the edge of the trunk and her
tears dropped on a little, old-fashioned black velvet coat that had
been her mother's. Impulsively Madge caught it up and pressed it to her
lips. After a long moment she laid it across her lap and began
smoothing it with loving hands, tenderly tracing its lines with her
forefinger. As she was about to fold it and lay it in its accustomed
place her hand came in contact with something hard in the cuff of one
sleeve between the velvet and the satin lining.
"What can it be?" she wondered, as she fingered it through the cloth.
"It feels like a key. If I break two or three stitches, I can pull it
out."
It was at least five minutes before she managed to make an opening
large enough to admit the working out of the little hard object. As she
had guessed, it was a small brass key with a bit of faded violet ribbon
attached to it.
Madge looked curiously at it as it lay in her hand. To whom did the key
belong? What did it unlock? Why had her mother sewed it into the sleeve
of the black velvet coat? Or had her mother placed it there? The little
captain sighed. She could ask endless questions concerning her find,
but she could answer none of them.
"There may be a box in the trunk which I have overlooked," she
reflected. "I never do things thoroughly."
Springing from the floor, Madge ran across the attic to where her aunt
always kept a pile of brown wrapping paper. Tearing off a strip she
carried it to her corner and, laying it on the floor at one side of her
mother's trunk, sat down beside it. One by one, with reverent hands,
she lifted the various garments from it, piling them over one another
on the paper. But when the trunk, bereft of its last article, stood
empty before her, she stared in disappointment at the pile of articles
at her side. There was nothing in it that bore the slightest
resemblance to a box.
"It's like 'hunting for a needle in a haystack,'" she mourned. "This
key might fit a lock thousands of miles from here. It can't be the key
to the trunk; it is too small." She bent forward to examine the lock.
"No, the key to this trunk is ever so much larger. Perhaps the trunk
has a false bottom!"
This being a positive inspiration, Madge set to work on the bottom of
the trunk, her investigations meeting with no success. She was more
disheartened than she cared to admit, even to herself, as she replaced
the contents of the trunk and, reluctantly shutting down the lid,
gathered up her treasures and went down the stairs with dragging feet.
Her pleasure in the beautiful fabrics had vanished, and the longing to
probe into the past of her dear ones was uppermost in her mind.
Her first impulse on entering the kitchen, where Eleanor and her mother
still labored with the jelly, was to show them the little key. Then the
same strange influence which had forced her to return to the trunk kept
her silent. The finding of the little key should be her secret.
Mrs. Butler and Eleanor exclaimed admiringly over the silks. It was as
though they were seeing them for the first time. Eleanor was delighted
with the prospect of possessing an evening gown of the rose color, and
the two girls were soon deep in planning the way in which they intended
having their frocks made.
"May I keep Mother's jewel box with me, Aunt Sue?" asked Madge an hour
later, as she rose to go to her room, her roll of blue silk tucked
under one arm, the sandalwood box in her hand.
"Of course you may, my dear. As long as you are going to use the silks
you might as well take the jewels too," sighed Mrs. Butler.
"Thank you," returned her niece, bending to kiss the older woman's
cheek, then she walked quietly from the room, her cheerful face
unusually sober.
"Madge is always sad after a visit to her mother's trunk," remarked
Eleanor, after her cousin had gone.
Mrs. Butler nodded, her own face saddened as she went back over the
years. Some day she would tell Madge the truth concerning her father
and why he had never returned to the homestead, but not now. She did
not wish to cast the slightest shadow upon her niece's joyous
anticipations of the coming trip.
Once in her room Madge took the little key from the pocket of her middy
blouse and laid it on her dressing table. Drawing up a chair, she sat
down, and opening the jewel box, began taking out the ornaments,
spreading them on the table before her. To her eyes, unaccustomed to
the sight of jewelry, they made an imposing array. When the last
trinket was out she turned her attention to the box itself. Empty, it
was larger and deeper than she supposed. Despite the fact that the
jewelry had been removed it was still heavy.
"It must be the weight of the wood that makes it feel heavy," she
reflected. "Why, it has a keyhole! I never noticed that before, it is
so far down, and, besides, the box has been unlocked ever since I can
remember."
She carefully examined the keyhole, then, with a swift rush of
disappointment, came the thought that the mysterious key was merely
that of the sandalwood box. To be sure, there were two little brass
catches which fastened the box tightly together. The lock had been put
on, no doubt, as an extra security, and rarely, if ever, used. But if
such were the case, why had the key been secreted in the sleeve of the
black velvet coat? After all, it might not fit the lock on the box. If
it did, then her secret was not really a secret after all. Madge
reached for the object of her cogitations and inserted it in the lock.
It fitted. She gave it one quick turn, then endeavored to pull it out.
It stuck. Madge held the back of the box with one hand to keep it from
slipping and pulled hard. She felt the box itself give. Then to her
astonishment she saw that the lower part of the box formed a drawer,
the existence of which was cunningly hidden by the carving, and it now
stood open before her. In it lay a small black leather book, and under
the book was a single envelope addressed to her mother.
With wondering eyes the girl peered into the envelope. Her hands shook
as she drew forth several closely written sheets of paper. Unfolding
them she saw only the salutation, "Beloved"; then she turned to the
signature. It read, "Your devoted husband, Robert Morton."
Madge gazed in fascination at her father's clear, bold handwriting. If
it were in the least indicative of character, her father must have been
a good man and true. Undoubtedly he had proved himself an honor to the
Navy and the Flag he had sworn to serve. She experienced a curious
thrill of satisfaction at this thought. Tearing her eyes from the
beloved name, she went back to the first page of the letter and began
to read, but when she reached the end of the second page she cried out
in anguish, and, laying her curly head on the dressing table, sobbed
heart-brokenly.
"I can't bear it!" she wailed. "O Father, Father! how could they be so
cruel?" After a few moments she raised her head with a long, quivering
sigh, and went on with the letter. When she had finished it, she took
up the little black book. Her tears fell fast as she perused its pages.
It was her father's log book and contained, besides the notes
concerning his last fateful voyage as a naval officer, memoranda of his
personal life aboard ship as well.
Over the last half dozen pages--the record ended abruptly--Madge's
grief burst forth anew. After she had finished she sat for a long time
holding the little book against her cheek. The distant ringing of the
supper bell brought her to a realization of her surroundings. Tenderly
she laid the book and the letter in the secret drawer that had held
them so faithfully, inviolate from the eyes of the world; then, locking
the drawer she withdrew the key, and, taking from a box on the dressing
table a slender gold chain, her only bit of ornament outside her
mother's jewelry, Madge opened the catch and hung the key upon it.
"It will be safe there," she said half aloud. "But now I have a secret
worth keeping until I find the man who spoiled my father's life. And
when I do"--Madge's red lips set in a determined line--"I'll make him
tell the truth about Father to the whole world."